Email is the Net’s most powerful marketing tool. And autoresponders are the best idea yet for marketing with email.

There is an old saying that the first ad rarely sells. You have to put your product, service, or idea in front of a prospect several times before she buys.

Autoresponders are designed specifically to get your message back to the same prospect over and over. That’s why most autoresponder packages come in groups of 7 messages–from the 7 message marketing rule that has been the rule in advertising since our grandparents were in diapers.

But what do you say in your 7 messages? We’ve written autoresponder series for hundreds of customers. Here is one method that always works.

This method is called REMIND ‘EM. People don’t read your sales letter as carefully as you think. They tend to skim. They read the first message, but miss the second and third message. The prospect may not tune in again until message five. It’s so easy for people to completely miss your main points intended to lead to a sale.

It’s important to *repeat* your main message over and over. Say it once, twice, three times in your first message. Say your main message in a different way in the second message. Re-cap your main point again in the third message. That way, people who aren’t paying attention still get your important ideas.

In a nutshell, multiple streams of income means your business has more than one way to make money. For instance, you sell products and you sell services. Those are different streams of incomes. But that’s just the beginning. Below are 10 ideas of different income sources you can use to increase your business’s bottom line:

1. Sell a variety of services. Or you can bundle your services into packages depending on what your typical client is looking for. But be careful about this one. Don’t spread yourself too thin. You want to offer a few different services or a choice of packages but you don’t want too many options because it’s very difficult to market yourself effectively.

2. Sell your own products. These can be information products (books, home study courses, CDs, special reports, etc.) or they can be physical products. You can also group similar products into product lines. Then you can upsell, downsell or cross-sell products to different customers on your list.

3. Sell other people’s products (or services). Here’s where you become an affiliate. Basically how it works is once you’re approved to be an affiliate, you get your own link. Anytime someone uses that link and buys a product, you can a percentage of the sale. That percentage can be anywhere from 10 percent (mostly for services) to more than 50 percent.

Product naming is a key aspect of branding. The name you ultimately choose will reflect who you are, your company’s personality and vision. But more importantly, it must unforgettably embody the promise of your product’s main benefit to your potential customers. It can dovetail generically with your competition, but ideally, it should stand out from the crowd. Where to begin? Here are some basic guidelines.

If the field’s too crowded, be unique

MSN Search, Netscape Search, AOL Search, they all stayed in the same category, so you could play it safe and go with Stupendous Search or Super-Duper Search. This works for a time, but as soon as the field gets too crowded, you’ll be lost in the mush of sameness with ever diminishing name recognition. If you’re in it for the long haul, better to break away from the crowd with a name like Google, Yahoo, or even Dogpile (though I’m not a fan of going into the scat category just to be unique). Even Kinkos—the founder’s nickname (he had kinky red hair in school)—is different enough to be memorable.

The moment I decided to specialize as a direct response copywriter (which means you get a response directly from the marketing materials, there’s no middle person involved, like a sales rep) I knew there would be one thing that would determine if I would be eating steak or eating mac and cheese.

And what’s the one thing? The results I got for my clients.

Therefore, improving results became a pretty big focus of mine. You might even call it a passion. (Some people who aren’t nearly as nice have called it in an obsession.)

Regardless, here are 5 tips that can help you improve the conversions of your marketing materials.

1. Know who you’re talking to. If I hear anyone say “women are my potential customers” or “anyone with skin is my target market” (yes, that really was a direct quote from someone who sold Mary Kay or Arbonne or something like that) I will send my border collies (all 3 of them) to your house and force you to play fetch with them until your arm falls off. Seriously, the quickest way you can end up with the most dismal results imaginable is to try and talk to everyone. Come up with a specific customer — the more specific the better — and make sure your marketing materials speak directly to that customer.